Acknowledging how many credits OptimaFit uses, I’ve been selective about what populations I put together and the hypothesis and logic for each run (to level of knowledge anyway). To being with, when modelling North African populations, Egyptian provides the highest percentage, however I wanted to see how that would compare by placing more North African populations in, and then seeing if its still the best fit when each model is run. I have no doubt I have some minor North African, which based on my ancestry, seems logical. For what MyHeritage is worth, I get 1.5% North African, my sister gets 2.9%. She also scores some North African on myOrigins. We also get varying amounts across certain calculators. Ideally, I would also do an OptimaFit for my grandfather (the likely source of the North African), however I'm patiently counting down until the Eurogenes store reopens to get his coordinates. In the mean time, it may be difficult to deduce findings simply based off of mine alone.
For the first experiment, I added a number of North African populations listed in the image below. You can add up to 20 populations on GenoPlot when conducting OptimaFit, however I thought I'd stick to a smaller amount, specifically the ones I have previously modeled that I know I score some of.
Probably not overly surprising, Egyptian comes out on top. I plan on doing this for my grandfather to see if Egyptian is also his best fit. Depending on this, I may also do the same for my mother and sister. Can it be said Egyptian is the possible source of the North African? Its possible, but I need to validate this with more family members (as much as you can validate ancestry without a paper trail 900+ years ago).
Sample: Balkan Kiwi ► BalkanKiwi Fit: 1.2521 Results: Irish 84.6 Croatian 12 Egyptian 3.4
For my next experiment, I wanted to look at Levantine. This post shows that Lebanese_Christian is a good fit when using those particular populations, however I wanted to take this a step further and include Levantine populations only. I also added Egyptian, as I was curious to see how strong it is when compared to Levantine populations (I wasn't expecting it to be stronger, but what's the harm in trying with such a great tool).
Once again I included populations I know I score small amounts of when modelling:
What surprised me is that Samaritan is the best fit. Admittedly I've never modeled Samaritan before, and I was expecting Lebanese_Christian to still be the best fit. I've done some brief research and came across this 23andMe article. This is from 2008, so I'm not sure if the consensus has changed since then with new research. If every Ashkenazi Jew were to run this exact Levantine setup, would Samaritan be the best fit for most people? I'm not sure, possibly not if they are a unique population, so hopefully someone more knowledgeable in Jewish genetics can answer. Perhaps I could improve upon the populations I've selected. I'll be curious to see if my grandfather also gets the same result. I suppose Samaritan could also just be a "fill in" for something else, however it seems Samaritan is distinct enough that it may not be the case, and the purpose of OptimaFit is to not use proxies in a sense for something else, i.e. if Lebanese_Christian is still a better fit, it wouldn't pick Samaritan to represent it, as it has the choice of Samaritan if its a better fit overall. I'm yet to play around with unscaled data and/or turning penalty off to see what happens.
Sample: Balkan Kiwi ► BalkanKiwi Fit: 1.1805 Results: Irish 84.8 Croatian 10.2 Samaritan 5
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Originally Posted by BalkanKiwi
